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The Day Robert Mugabe Was Greeted at City Hall

Foreign leaders aren’t routinely honored with receptions at New York’s City Hall. In the last two decades, as best as we can tell, only two Africans have received this red-carpet treatment.

One was the revered Nelson Mandela. That was in 1990, when David N. Dinkins was mayor. Mr. Mandela had been released four months earlier from his 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa.

The other leader was President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Not many people put his name and “revered” together.

Perhaps they once did, when he led the liberation of his country, then called Rhodesia, from oppressive rule by its white minority. But by 2002, when he was ushered into New York’s seat of democracy, he was a certified human rights disaster.

Rights groups condemned him for jailing and torturing political opponents, for repressing independent-minded judges and journalists, for starving many of his people by denying government food aid to opposition-dominated districts.

His signature program, the seizure of white-owned farms, was blamed for contributing to mass hunger and for amounting to a land grab that benefited only his loyalists.

This was the man warmly welcomed at City Hall under the aegis of the City Council’s Black, Hispanic and Asian Caucus. His main host was Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, a former Black Panther who has lost none of his zest for revolutionary oratory, 1960s-style.

Only a dozen of the Council’s 51 members attended the event. But the many who stayed away, fearing the third-rail potential of a racially sensitive issue, acquiesced with their silence. Gifford Miller, then the Council speaker, issued a statement calling the reception a matter of free speech.

Six years later, the human-rights situation in Zimbabwe has hardly improved. A runoff presidential election set for Friday has been marked by violence, with dozens of opposition supporters reported to have been killed. The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, though he won the first election round, withdrew from the race and took refuge in the Dutch Embassy. On Wednesday, no less than Mr. Mandela registered strong disapproval, condemning the “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe.

Given all that, might Mr. Barron harbor second thoughts about having brought Mr. Mugabe into City Hall?

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“Does he do things that I disagree with? Yes,” Mr. Barron said. But he clearly still regards Mr. Mugabe as a liberator more than an oppressor. “You didn’t care about black Africans when whites were killing them in Rhodesia,” he said. As he sees it, the real reason that Mr. Mugabe has come under strong attack from the West is the confiscation of white-owned farms.

Echoing Mr. Mugabe’s party line, he suggested that Mr. Tsvangirai is a tool of “British imperialism and the United States as well.” As for political violence, “I don’t think we can deny people are dying,” Mr. Barron said. “Who’s responsible and how many — we need to really get reports other than from the opposition.”

While not going remotely that far to stand up for a widely reviled despot, other Council members had no regrets about the 2002 reception.

“I attended as a matter of interest,” said Councilman G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx. “I certainly didn’t attend it as a matter of support for Robert Mugabe. Everybody, I suppose, deserves a hearing. Councilman Barron at the time was advancing Mugabe as being someone who had some legitimacy.” But Mr. Koppell added, “Given the horrendous circumstances of today, I’m not sure I would attend again.”

Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, though a member of the sponsoring caucus, says he did not attend the reception. But that was not a boycott, he said. He didn’t see what “the big deal” was. “The City Council is by no means a homogenous body of political thought,” Mr. Liu said. “Individual council members have people they admire and people they despise.”

Attempts on Thursday to reach Mr. Miller, the former Council speaker, failed. But the current speaker, Christine C. Quinn, while not directly criticizing her predecessor, called it a “wrong decision to have Mugabe on a vaulted stage, the chamber of the New York City Council.”

“This building stands for something,” she said.

The last word here will go to a repentant Bill de Blasio, a Brooklyn councilman who went to the reception. He should have known better, he says.

He was trapped in “a time warp,” wanting to meet a man who had been “one of the more prominent liberation leaders in Africa,” Mr. de Blasio said. But “even based on the information we had six years ago, there was sufficient information to not have him in our chambers.”

It was “a mistake,” he said, and now “I feel ashamed of it.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Day Robert Mugabe Was Greeted at City Hall. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe